ChetOS.net

I watched about 6 episodes of Lost during season one.  Amanda and I had just gotten married, our antenna didn't pick up the station, so we had friends record it for us.  After about six episodes they stopped recording it, so we stopped watching.

I remember thinking that every episode got us deeper into the plot, and never resolved any loose ends.  Now that the series finale has aired, we discover that they just kept doing that.  I am glad I stopped when I did.

For our seventh anniversary, Amanda and I went to see Cirque du Soleil's La Noubla at Downtown Disney last Thursday.  The show was excellent and worth every penny.  I particularlly liked the juggler, the silk rope flier guy, and the trampoline finale.

The auditorium (or whatever you call it) was a lot smaller inside than we thought it would be.  The worst seats were still pretty close to the stage.  The show was French based (shock), and had a lot of very cool parts.  All the music is preformed live by musicians partially hidden on the sides of the stage.  The performers do not enter and exit from the sides of the stage, there are large sections in the stage that can be raised about 20 feet and the performers come in by standing on the floor of this section.  These sections can also be lowered deeper than the floor, so a performer can just stand there and be lowered out for his exit.

During each act, there were clowns mimicing the "true" performer.  For example, during the juggler act, a clown was off to the side messing around with the stuff the juggler would need in a minute.

There are four categories of seats: front and center, Category 2, Category 3, and Category 4.  We got Category 2, which is in on the ground floor, but off-center.  It was neat because, for example, when the bicyclist raced to the edge of the stage and stopped, it was right about face level and kinda unnerving.  However, if I were to go again, I would not buy the nice seats again.  I would buy Category 3 seats, which are above the stage and further back.  There was just too much happing on stage to take it all in from as close as we were.  Being further back would allowed us to see more of it without shaking our heads back and forth.

Good luck getting seats though.  I wanted to go during the weekend, but both shows were sold out every night.  Finally settled on a Thursday.

Robbie has officially moved out of our room.  He has been taking all his daytime naps upstairs in his room for about 2 months now.  Sunday night was his first night in his room.  He did great.  We put him down at 8:00, he made a peep around 10:30, and we woke him up at 7:00 in the morning.  Last night he didn't even peep, he just slept :-).

Amanda and I also moved upstairs.  The downstairs bedroom will become a guest bedroom.

It is sad that Robbie is out, but it makes me happy that he is progressing down the road to independence.  I know there will be many more of these occasions, but this was the first big one.

Amanda and I have been married for seven years now... wow.  Love you Amanda!

We use a lot of stored procedures in our applications. I don't like that, but that is how it is.  One of our applications uses Oracle, and the primary method of returning a dataset is through a cursor.

DECLARE
   cv_1 REFCURSOR;
BEGIN
   sp_example(cv_1);
END;

This is fine, but it makes it very annoying to debug because Toad (essentially a low-quality SQL Server Management Studio for Oracle) doesn't know to output the cursor to the datagrid.

I finally found a way around this.

DECLARE
   type cv_1 is REF CURSOR;
BEGIN
   sp_example(:cv_1);
END;

Notice the two changes.  First, cv_1 is now a type, and there is colon before it when it is used as a paramter.  When Toad executes this, it will ask you to bind cv_1 to a variable.  Just choose "cursor" from the drop down list, and press ok.  The output of the stored procedure (which is in cv_1) will be displayed in the datagrid.

Mayor Bloomberg was really quick to speculate that the Times Square car bombing was likely “homegrown” and could have been placed by “somebody with a political agenda who doesn't like the health care bill or something.”

The first thing Bloomberg thinks of are those who don't like ObamaCare, presumably conservatives or Tea Party activists.

Turns out it was a Pakistani-American, and that Pakistan's Taliban has claimed responsibility for it.

But that's right, keep trying to make it look like it is rational to think that conservitive activists are just itching to blow up a supermarket.